Finally, on April 17, , the Khmer Rouge entered the city, winning the civil war and ending the fighting. About half a million Cambodians had died during the civil war, yet the worst was still to come. Former civil servants, doctors, teachers and other professionals were stripped of their possessions and forced to toil in the fields as part of a re-education process.
Those that complained about the work, concealed their rations or broke rules were usually tortured in a detention center, such as the infamous S, and then killed. During the Cambodian genocide, the bones of millions of people who died from malnutrition, overwork or inadequate health care also filled up mass graves across the country.
Money, private property, jewelry, gambling, most reading material and religion were outlawed; agriculture was collectivized; children were taken from their homes and forced into the military; and strict rules governing sexual relations, vocabulary and clothing were laid down. The Khmer Rouge, which renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea, even insisted on realigning rice fields in order to create the symmetrical checkerboard pictured on their coat of arms.
At first, Pol Pot largely governed from behind the scenes. He became prime minister in after Prince Norodom was forced to resign. By that time, border skirmishes were occurring regularly between the Cambodians and the Vietnamese. The fighting intensified in , and in December the Vietnamese sent more than 60, troops, along with air and artillery units, across the border.
On January 7, , they captured Phnom Penh and forced Pol Pot to flee back into the jungle, where he resumed guerrilla operations. Throughout the s, the Khmer Rouge received arms from China and political support from the United States, which opposed the decade-long Vietnamese occupation. In a Khmer Rouge splinter group captured Pol Pot and placed him under house arrest. He died in his sleep on April 15, , at age 72 due to heart failure. A United Nations-backed tribunal has convicted only a handful of Khmer Rouge leaders of crimes against humanity.
The Cambodian strongman, a veteran of many parent-teacher meetings, schooled his compatriots in Marxist-Leninist ideology after being sacked as an elementary school teacher in He failed his exams and returned to Cambodia.
Despite his lack of training, Pot got a job as a teacher of history, geography and morals at a school in Phnom Penh. He proved to be an incompetent educator and joined the Khmer Rouge —a militant faction of the Cambodian Communist Party — which ousted the government and blew up the central bank.
He initiated a purge of political rivals and citizens antithetical to his disastrous economic and cultural reforms. In , the Documentation Center of Cambodia mapped 23, mass graves containing approximately 1. The Khmer Rouge was overthrown in after an invasion by neighbouring Vietnam. Image: Wikipedia. Duvalier professed to have supernatural powers, even claiming that John F Kennedy was assassinated because of a curse he had placed on the former American president.
ET NOW. In the years that followed, as Cambodia began the process of reopening to the international community, the full horrors of the regime became apparent.
Survivors told their stories to shocked audiences, and in the s the Hollywood movie The Killing Fields brought the plight of the Khmer Rouge victims to worldwide attention. Pol Pot was denounced by his former comrades in a show trial in July , and sentenced to house arrest in his jungle home. But less than a year later he was dead - denying the millions of people who were affected by this brutal regime the chance to bring him to justice. The UN helped establish a tribunal to try surviving Khmer Rouge leaders, beginning work in Only three Khmer Rouge leaders have ever been sentenced.
Kaing Guek Eav - known as Duch - was jailed for life in for running the notorious Tuol Sleng prison. In November , the tribunal also found them guilty of genocide over the attempted extermination of the Cham and Vietnamese minorities.
It remains the first and only genocide conviction against the Khmer Rouge. Cambodian Genocide Program. On January 7, , the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, formally charged with lying under oath and obstructing justice, begins in the Senate.
As instructed in Article 1 of the U. The two men nearly crashed into the Channel along the way, however, as their balloon was weighed Congress sets January 7, as the date by which states are required to choose electors for the country's first-ever presidential election. A month later, on February 4, George Washington was elected president by state electors and sworn into office on April 30, Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox.
On January 7, , the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team travels 48 miles west from Chicago to play their first game in Hinckley, Illinois. The Globetrotters were the creation of Abe Saperstein of Chicago, who took over coaching duties for a team of African American players The confessed Colorado cannibal Alferd Packer is released from prison on parole after serving 18 years.
One of the ragged legions of gold and silver prospectors who combed the Rocky Mountains searching for fortune in the s, Alferd Packer also supplemented his meager income
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